I spent the entire night in the emergency room at Evergreen Hospital. I went in after having one of my worst coughing fits and bronchospams yet, hard enough to crack another rib.

The emergency room doctor I saw suspects that the H1N1 virus might not have been the catalyst for all the health issues I’ve been having the past three weeks. (I was never actually tested for the presence of the virus. Since I had similar symptoms when everyone else had them, my primary care doctor felt H1N1 was the most obvious explanation.) The ER doctor thinks my pneumonia, sinus infection and lingering cough, which is resisting treatment, could instead have resulted from pertussis, also known as whooping cough.

Pertussis is sometimes called the “100 day cough.” According to the doctor, although antibiotics will knock out the bacterial infection, the cough usually lingers for several weeks. Add to that my (usually mild and well-controlled) asthma, and you have a perfect storm of sorts.

The other reason to suspect pertussis is that, in the course of carrying out my literacy outreach work, I have been in many child-care centers, some of them quite large and with very young infants. It is quite possible that I picked the infection up from an unimmunized or not-yet-fully immunized child, or even from an adult child-care employee whose immunity to pertussis has diminished over time.

The ER nurse assigned to me swabbed my nose, a procedure I don’t recommend to anyone. The results have been sent to the CDC for analysis, a process that can take about a week. The complicating factor is that I was not tested for the presence of either the bacterial pertussis or the viral H1N1 infection when I first presented to my doctor’s office. If it is pertussis, the first antibiotic — which I was given for the lung infection — should have treated the infection itself. At this point, we may simply be dealing with persistent side effects from the infection.

I was given a nebulizer breathing treatment while I was at the emergency room. It worked wonders, and I was able to sleep nearly 6 hours without coughing after coming home. The doctor and the hospital’s respiratory therapy department sent me home with a portable nebulizer kit that I can use with albuterol to open up my lungs when I have bronchospams.

As the ER doctor said, we may never know at this point what process started the entire cycle of pneumonia, a sinus infection and unrelenting, rib-cracking coughing. I do know that before I go back to working with and near hundreds of children and child-care providers, for everyone’s protection, I am going to ask my primary care doctor for immunizations against anything I could possibly pick up — seasonal flu, H1N1 virus, pertussis and chicken pox (which I don’t think I’ve ever been exposed to). I am also getting a pneumonia vaccine.

I can’t afford this level of illness again, especially given the limitations I have regarding which medicines I can take. Those limitations make it especially hard to treat the causes and symptoms of anything I pick up as efficiently and effectively as possible.